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Media Matters in Twitter War Over Chelsea Clinton Speaking Fees

She is commanding up to $75,000 per appearance...

David Brock has prematurely climbed into the tank for Hillary and that has led to embarrassing moments like this one. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd blasted Clintonworld for its greed, writing of Chelsea Clinton, "It’s strange to see her acting out in a sense now, joining her parents in cashing in to help feed the rapacious, gaping maw of Clinton Inc."

As the 34-year-old tries to wean some of the cronies from the Clinton Foundation — which is, like the Clintons themselves, well-intended, wasteful and disorganized — Chelsea is making speeches that go into foundation coffers. She is commanding, as The Times’s Amy Chozick reported, up to $75,000 per appearance...

There’s something unseemly about it, making one wonder: Why on earth is she worth that much money? Why, given her dabbling in management consulting, hedge-funding and coattail-riding, is an hour of her time valued at an amount that most Americans her age don’t make in a year? (Median household income in the United States is $53,046.)

If she really wants to be altruistic, let her contribute the money to some independent charity not designed to burnish the Clinton name as her mother ramps up to return to the White House and as she herself drops a handkerchief about getting into politics.

There was disgust over Politico’s revelation that before she switched to a month-to-month contract, Chelsea was getting wildly overpaid at $600,000 annually — or over $25,000 per minute on air — for a nepotistic job as a soft-focus correspondent for NBC News.

Chelsea is still learning the answer to a question she asked when she interviewed the Geico gecko: “Is there a downside to all this fame?”

Even though Maureen Dowd is about as liberal as it gets, Media Matters jumped into action as Clinton's bodyguards. Its minions couldn't mount a credible defense of the Clintons so instead they called Dowd a hypocrite for only getting paid half as much as Chelsea, and possibly not donating her fees to charity.

This isn't much of an argument since Chelsea's fees go to the private Clinton Foundation which isn't a real charity. And what do Maureen Dowd's speaking fees have to do with anything? The larger point is that Chelsea Clinton is getting paid because of who her parents are.

On the Media Matters site, hysterical liberals running off their old anti-Republican talking points began shrieking about the "free market". But things didn't go as well on Twitter.